Where Dreams Books 1-3

by M. L. Buchman

  That last did it for her.

  # # #

  Cassidy didn’t glance toward the last covered bottle of wine. She always preferred to let a wine speak for itself. She had little respect for judges who looked ahead, setting their expectations before they had discovered what was really in the wine.

  But this was different.

  This was a blind-tasting challenge. Ten bottles of wine lined up on an immaculate white tablecloth. An okay ambience with a modern motif, the restaurant had been around six months or so.

  They should have decanted the wines into identical carafes for a truly blind tasting, but at least the foil had been stripped away and the brown paper presentation was always more popular with the crowd.

  The final wine’s color was splendid. A ruby red so opaque it was almost black. The initial nose was a bit closed, but the wine had been properly served at sixty degrees, nicely below room temperature. Another point to the event’s sponsor. A quick swirl revealed abundant tears running down the inside of the glass. And the wine opened a bit. She swirled again. Dark fruit. Brown spice. Tarragon. Even… No, she wasn’t going to jump to conclusions. A bad habit on one hand. And on the other, she had an audience.

  The restaurant owner had done a nice job of marketing his “Ten on January Tenth” challenge, pulling more than just the usual crowd of oenophiles out of the woodwork. He’d promised some fine wines in the collection, both U.S. and European. The nice spread of free appetizers hadn’t hurt either, though they needed to be farther from the tasting table. Twice she’d had to cross to the far side of the dining room to make sure the scent was the wine and not his Italian herbs. The second time the owner noticed, and in moments the waiters had shifted the more aromatic foods to the farther end of the buffet. Good service.

  The sip and quick intake of breath over the wine as it still swam on her tongue gave the expected results. Lemony, and a confirmation of the anise on the nose rode into the finish. She spit into the bucket and nosed the wine again.

  There was something more. She didn’t have it yet.

  Another swirl and sip. More air. Another spit. Exactly the same dark richness.

  Ah, there it was: not something there, but something missing. Almost no tannins at all. A wine this dark, yet so clean; it definitely wasn’t mainstream. It was a true challenge wine to set apart the real tasters.

  She opened her eyes and realized that the restaurant was completely silent. Every face was turned in her direction, even the early diners had stopped eating to watch her. Mr. Terence, that obnoxious cookbook chef who coyly avoided any request for his first name—it probably said “Mister” on his birth certificate—had peeked at the wine label and then crumpled his bit of notepaper. The restaurant owner had noticed and was scowling. There was someone who had just lost his next invitation here.

  Cassidy didn’t need to look.

  It took her several moments to come back to the wine, the taste still rolling across her tongue. To come back and realize that she really had done something; she had moved out of the crowd of being but one of many in the New York tastings. Here, in Seattle, the many were waiting to hear her verdict. Hers.

  The temptation to dismiss the phenomenon as a big frog in a small pond was there. But Josh was here from Gourmet Week as well, which had made her nervous through the first four wines. He’d actually trained under Parker. He too wore a look of anticipation. He held up a piece of notepaper, carefully folded to show he was ready, and nodded for her to go ahead. Well, there was no avoiding it, and she didn’t need to on this one.

  “Italian. Apulia.” Some of the diners’ faces blanked. “That’s the region. The boot-heel of Italy.”

  Josh was grinning when she turned to face Mister Terence who was making a show of hiding the bottle.

  “Taurino from the Negroamaro grape. The Notarpanaro Salento Rosso. Either the ’97 or the ’01, but I’d bet on the former.”

  Terence’s face fell and Josh flipped open his slip of paper and turned it for her to see. He’d written just a number on it, “97.” The restaurant owner clapped his hands together and laughed, his teeth bright in his dark, Italian face.

  “An exquisite final choice, Mr. Parrano. It truly completes the other wines. Even a rearrangement of your last name. A nice touch.”

  He bowed deeply before taking her shoulders and kissing each cheek.

  “Angelo.” He had one of those Italian accents that was designed to make a woman melt and it wasn’t hard to give in to it. “Please call me, Angelo, Ms. Knowles. Always Angelo.”

  “Cassidy then.” She let herself melt a bit farther, her wine columnist attitude slipping off a little more.

  He took her hand and raised it. “Ten wines and not a miss.” Josh had missed one, but a totally understandable mixup unless you’d specifically studied the Loire Valley Vouvrays. He’d gotten the region and grape, but not the winery. Mister Terence had missed the Vouvray placing it as an Oregon Pinot of all silliness, the Taurino, and three others, two of them quite obvious mistakes. Two of the three amateurs had bested his score though they both missed the Vouvray, a tricky wine because of its gentle voice, and the Taurino.

  “A meal on the house. No, you don’t get to order, I will make the menu specially for you.”

  Everyone applauded as he conducted her to a table set for two. Angelo looked around and waved for Josh to take the other seat; Josh might be happily married but he was an old friend and a lively dinner companion. Angelo left Terence out in the cold with the three amateurs to browse the free appetizer table.

  “If you give me the meal, I can’t write it up. Conflict of interest.”

  “Some other time, you come back and I charge you double. Not tonight.” He lowered his voice. “I’ve been waiting for an excuse to chase that hoity-toity Mr. Terence out of here, but you have taken care of that for me. He won’t dare show his face for quite a while to come. For this I am eternally grateful. And you are eternally welcome in my restaurant.”

  She nodded, not minding being used to that end in the least, and then glanced at Josh. “Perhaps I could make one request about the menu.”

  She raised an eyebrow and Josh laughed, then flipped open his slip of paper again. Angelo tried to look angry but he couldn’t hold it for more than a moment. He stepped back to the tasting table and, securing the Taurino from Terence with a slight tug, he placed it at their table.

  “The meal shall match this perfectly.”

  # # #

  “Damn, you’re good!” Russell took another piece of garlic bread and mashed it around in the red sauce to soak up as much as he could.

  Angelo’s kitchen was now in full swing. Dinner was happening with a crash of pans and calls back and forth across the cook line. Russell had grabbed some pasta and retreated to the sidelines to watch the mayhem. The kitchen ran with a smooth perfection that should happen only in movies.

  “You should see what I sent out on the floor tonight. Exquisite. The Cingale with Truffle Sauce.” Angelo kissed his fingertips and threw the kiss to the kitchen’s ceiling. “Outdid myself even if I’m the one who says so.”

  He slapped Russell on top of the head. “That’s grilled boar meat to you, you peasant.”

  “I know what cingale is,” he cuffed Angelo back somewhat harder. “And your food is always awesome, buddy.” Russell kissed his own fingers and then made a show of licking them clean of the garlic butter.

  “Yeah, you need to clean up. You’re messing up my kitchen, man. Just by breathing.” Angelo peeked into an oven and closed it again. He returned to slicing chives at an impossible rate for some garnish.

  Russell looked down to inspect himself. His jeans were smeared with white fiberglass resin from the seals on the new decking. It had hardened into crackling streaks that wouldn’t let go of the cloth even when he picked at them. His shirt was clean, just a couple tears from where he’d caught
it on the old decking he’d been tearing off the boat. Maybe he was a bit disreputable for the stainless-steel-and-white-tile kitchen.

  Just because Angelo was right, Russell wasn’t about to admit it.

  “Wait until I start the woodwork. Then I can offer you a healthy dose of sawdust on your tile floor to make it look properly lived in. You could eat off the damn thing now.”

  “Thanks, but no thanks. I think a health inspector would rather see a rat in my kitchen than you.” Angelo danced around a half-dozen desserts with a squirt bottle adding little swirls of reduced pomegranate sauce even as the waiters put them on their trays. A moment later his sous chef dumped a steaming cauldron of homemade pasta into a colander. Angelo attacked it with quick tongs and a bit of oil before plating it next to an Eggplant Parmigiana that still bubbled from the oven.

  Russell licked another dribble of butter off the back of his hand.

  He smelled her before he saw her. Like warm wood and something else he couldn’t identify but could never forget.

  He turned to look and wasn’t disappointed. Trim and chic in a black pantsuit over a black turtleneck. The cut was perfect for her figure which was pleasantly womanly in its curves. It suited her five foot ten very nicely, making her look even taller and more slender than she was. He checked her shoes, okay, five foot eight without the heels, which fit her even better. Her face was so subtly made up it looked as if she wore no makeup at all. Her russet hair pulled back into a tight chignon from which not a single strand strayed. The shape of jawline to neck, of ear to cheek, was like a flash from the past.

  For the first time in the month and a half since he’d closed the studio, he wished for lights and a camera. But she was everything he was leaving behind. Everything that had been wrong with his former life. He could imagine Melanie on his boat much easier than this one, even Melanie let her hair down on occasion—she actually made a trademark of just that.

  Where Melanie’s voice was affected French, to cover her New York accent, this woman’s voice was throaty and warm as she did the “thank you so much” thing with Angelo. She glanced at him twice with intensely hazel eyes that were deeper than the ocean. A glance he could easily read. “What is this slob doing dirtying up Angelo’s pristine kitchen?”

  Then she was gone and Angelo just stood there beaming.

  “Hey, Buddy-boy.” Russell poked his fork into his pasta. He had to do it a couple times before he finally landed some. “She’s got you bad.”

  “Oh yeah.” Angelo sounded a little dreamy. “You weren’t here. She’s just the nation’s hottest food-and-wine columnist. It took me six months to tempt her here.” He shook himself and then punched Russell’s arm hard.

  “And she loves my food and my restaurant!”

  “Hey! Ow already!” He knocked Angelo’s hat to the floor just as Angelo kicked Russell’s stool over backward. He landed hard against the refrigerator. Once he had his balance, he prepared to lunge forward.

  Angelo moved faster and aimed his weapon at Russell’s chest.

  “More garlic bread?”

  Russell kicked the stool back into place and took another steaming slice from the wicker basket. He easily matched his friend’s grin.

  # # #

  “The what of January?”

  “Just grab a bottle, cheese and crackers if you have ‘em and come along.”

  Russell dug around in the cooler, found a couple of beers. The cardboard box that was his pantry had some Ritz crackers, his absolute weakness. He slapped the package against his thigh to dislodge the worst of the wood dust from the box.

  He closed up his sailboat and followed Dave down onto the floating slipway. They turned toward the far end of ‘D’ dock. The thousand masts of Shilshole Marina cluttered the night sky. To the east, brightly lit houses looked down on them from atop the high cliff. To the west, Puget Sound stretched to the moonlit peaks of the Olympics. It was clear and cold enough to freeze a sailboat’s tail, or at least his own.

  “The what of January?” He repeated, his breath puffing a white cloud into the night air. He had to trot down the dock to catch up with Dave even though the man had to be in his fifties.

  “The ides.”

  “I thought only March had ides. The day Brutus stabbed his buddy Caesar in the behind.”

  “The ides. The fifteenth of March, May, July, and October, I think. The thirteenth of all the others. And today’s the thirteenth. Sounds like a good reason for a party.”

  Russell didn’t need any more prompting than that.

  “Lead on, Brutus. Just be careful of any desire to do some stabbing.” They arrived at Dave and Betsy’s forty-four foot catamaran. Russell had been sorely tempted to buy one of these; they were fast, spacious, and stable as could be. Unless you got flipped. In something nasty, like a hurricane, a monohull would roll under and usually self-right, sometimes without its mast, but at least it would right. A catamaran was more stable upside down than rightside up. A little too wild for him. It would also be a hell of a lot of boat to single-hand in a storm.

  He’d befriended Dave just to get a look inside and they’d spent hours talking about ocean crossings and ports of call. Russell had helped a buddy do the New York-Bahamas run on his friend’s J/boat, but that was a long step from crossing one of the oceans. Dave and Betsy had taken the Lark on a four-year tour that included both capes, Good Hope and Horn and all of the seven seas.

  “Ponds,” Betsy had corrected him. “Not seas. We talk about crossing the ponds, not so scary that way.”

  Still scared him either way.

  He clambered aboard and joined the crowd of ‘D’ dock liveaboards. Teri and Tom were curled up on one of the settees, a bottle of cheap white wine in front of them. He’d been here barely two weeks and he already knew of their reputation. It had been hard to miss actually.

  They had terrible fights when running in the local races, and screamingly good, or at least loud sex when at dock. Few secrets could be kept through a few millimeters of fiberglass hull. Even his Lady’s double-plank oak hull wasn’t going to muffle all that much if he ever had a flesh-and-blood lady aboard. Most sailors were discreet, Teri obviously didn’t care or didn’t think to. He eyed the incredibly tight sweater on the shapely dishwater blond. Or maybe she liked bragging.

  Russell slid in next to Perry. The old man had a bottle of decent whiskey capped beside him, a small tumbler in his massive fist. He rarely spoke, but Betsy had told Russell that the old-timer had been born on a tugboat off Vashon Island. Had worked boats, mostly log tugs and fishing tenders, for the eighty years since. He lived on a 1904 Arrow tug, one of only four built that year, that he was restoring it a little way down the dock.

  Dave and Betsy had made their money then moved to the boat and the seas. He drank Heineken and she had a glass of red wine in a short, wide glass that wouldn’t tip easily at sea.

  Others he didn’t know drifted in behind him, each arriving with a cold blast of the chill January air and a muttered curse from those closest to the hatch. As the crowd grew, he refused to be nudged from the small table with Perry and Dave. Soon, people were perched on counters or squatting by the windows.

  “What do you do to keep yourself busy?” Dave grabbed a couple of his Ritz crackers.

  “Other than my boat, you mean?”

  “Other than your boat.”

  “I take pictures. Used to.” Russell thought of the images of Angelo and the lighthouse still in his camera. “Still do.”

  “Any good?”

  Dave had asked the question, but it was Perry who inspected him with blue eyes shaded by a black Greek sailor’s hat, the rest of his face mostly lost in a white beard and mustache that would have put Santa Claus to shame.

  “Used to make a pretty decent living at it.”

  Perry nodded and sipped his whiskey.

  “Good,” Dave agreed. “N
eed something to give purpose to your wanderings. Betsy there is a marine botanist. Must’ve logged five thousand samples over the last decade. She has this little rig that lets her grab water at surface, then one, two, five, and ten meters all at once. Keeps her moving ahead. She catalogs the whole mess and ships the data to the Scripps Institute. They love her for it, though I’d hate to be staff grad student when she sends in a case. Me, I’m a writer. Spent thirty years doing technical writing. Now I’m doing the travel narrative thing and might do a fiction book set in the seaports of the world. What are you gonna do?”

  “You mean about ‘moving ahead’?” Russell munched on a couple of crackers and opened another bottle of beer. “Hadn’t really thought about it.”

  Hadn’t thought at all really. Back at Thanksgiving—when he’d made a joke to match every one of Angelo’s ideas about what to do with his life—Angelo had finally pulled a next-year’s calendar off the wall and heaved it at him.

  “Here, you big idiot. Buy a sailboat. Sail to each one on the calendar. By the end of the year you’ll be good enough to sail outta my life and let me get some peace.” It had taken him only two days to find the Lady and he’d bought her before her hull was even wet after the boat appraiser was done with it.

  Angelo had laughed when Russell told him of his purchase. “Getting pretty sick of you moping on my couch, when can you move?” Three weeks of slavery, but he’d got her watertight and moved aboard just yesterday afternoon.

  Hadn’t thought about what it meant to be a liveaboard; he simply did it.

  He glanced about the crowded cabin. Liveaboards came in two main varieties: couples and single men. Not a single woman in the whole crowd. Teri had gathered a small court, all of whom she flirted with shamelessly. Tom was approaching meltdown, even though she was snuggled back against him while she flirted with the others.

  “We know what those two will be doing.”

  Perry and Dave glanced over and answered in unison. “Fighting.” Perry’s first word of the evening.